Cinephiles Pack Your Bags – Howard W. French

While one frustrated fan has famously sued, many more movie-lovers have gotten around the censorship of Ang Lee’s award-winning film Lust, Caution by going to Hong Kong to see the full version. So writes Howard French in the New York Times:

Travelers have made their way to Hong Kong to see movies before, of course, but always in much smaller numbers. Critics and commentators here attribute the interest in Mr. Lee’s movie to a variety of factors, from word of mouth about risqué sexual content stripped from the censored version, to a sensitive political subtext rarely seen in mainland cinema, to the fame of the Academy Award-winning director.

Perhaps most important, though, is the rise of a class of affluent urbanites in China’s rich eastern cities who have grown increasingly accustomed to ever more choice in their lives. “I went to Hong Kong with my girlfriend to see “Lust, Caution” because it was heavily censored here,” said Liang Baijian, 25, a businessman and stock market investor from the Guangxi autonomous region. “We could have bought a pirated copy of the movie here, but we were not happy with the control and wanted to support the legal edition of the film.” [Full text]